Programming Literate Manifesto

Late last year, I decided to set up a second blog, focusing on exploring the world of academic literature relevant to our work as people who make software. The tone and content was very different to what I usually write here. I’ve now decided that while it’s interesting to explore this material, it was a mistake to try creating a second identity for this. I want to write about it, this is where I write, it belongs here. There are currently only a few posts at the other blog, so I’m going to import them all. If you’ve already read them or this content doesn’t interest you, filter the “academia” category.

This first one set the stall for the remaining posts. One thing made clear in the manifesto was that I wanted to encourage discussion: I’m not convinced blog comments are the place for that so comments remain off for the time being.

Programming Literate Manifesto

This blog is written by what you might call a “practising software engineer”, working in the field of mobile software. I’m hoping for a few things from the articles here, which fall into three main categories:

introduce more of “the primary literature” to people at the software coal face. Explore the applicability of research material to what we’re doing. Bring some more critical appraisal to the field. Invite discussion from working programmers about the relevance of the articles discussed.

get input from academics about related work, whether the analyses here are balanced, and how the researchers see the applicability of the work covered here to current practice. Welcome academics to the discussions on the articles – in other words to make this blog part of the interface between research and practice.

find out about some interesting work and have fun writing about it.

Sources

Papers and articles in this blog have to come from where I can find them, obviously. Largely that’s going to mean using the following resources:

Where the articles I cover are available online I’ll be linking to them, preferring free downloads over paywalled sites. Yes, IEEE, I’m looking at you.

Sandbox

I don’t know how easy it is to be truly dispassionate when writing, so it makes sense to lay out my stall. Hopefully that means intrinsic biases can be uncovered.

In my opinion, “software engineering” is the social science that describes how people involved in making software work and communicate with each other—and to some extent how they communicate to the computers too, at least so far as the created software and source code are tools that enable collaboration and are also the result of such.

That makes it quite a wide discipline (perhaps actually an interface discipline, or multiple disciplines looking for an interface). There’s some sociology and ethnography involved in identifying and describing the culture or cultures of software teams and communities. There’s the management science side, attempting to define “success” at various activities related to making software, trying to discover how to measure for and maximise such success. Questions exist over whether programming is best taught as an academic or vocational discipline, so education science is also on-topic. Then there’s the usability/HCI side related to the tools we use, and the mathematics and computer science that go into the building of those tools.

Just because a field is not a “hard” science, does not mean that useful results cannot be derived. It means that you have to be quite analytical about how someone else’s results apply to your circumstances, perhaps. That’s not to dismiss evidence-based software engineering out of hand, but to say that any result that is said to apply to all of software engineering in general needs to be peered at quite closely.